Saturday, July 14, 2007

Hey, I'll be the first to admit that Joni Pitkänen has come a long way with his English since moving to North America in 2003, apparently with much translation help from Philadelphia Flyers teammate SamiKapenen. Nevertheless, in interviews he suffers from the same problem that fellow Finn JariKurri once had — that is, rather than sounding like a professional hockey player of great skill that can improve our favourite hockey team, the listener instinctively cringes at what sounds like a one-sided conversation with an extremely bored, possibly sleepy, and almost certainly retarded lobotomy recipient with a Scandinavian accent.

To be fair, just looking at written Finnish, with its runaway compound words and liberal use of consecutive umlauts, I'm sure I'd lose about 100 IQ points everytime I opened my mouth in Helsinki. What we learned from Radek Dvorak, of course, is that a man is always more candid speaking in his native tongue, especially when his employer can't understand him (as is the case with Cantonese-speaking ladies on my streetcar, who I swear are making fun of me).

With this in mind, I sniffed around the interweb for any native-language interviews with our enigmatic new acquisition, Joni "minus 25" Pitkänen. In Philly he had a reputation for being withdrawn from other players on the team, so I was looking for clues as to whether he was actually a headcase or merely just sounded like one when speaking to english media.

Unfortunately, free Finnish to English translation sites are few and far between, as well as generally shitty, so I can't put much faith into the translation given. Nevertheless, when asked about playing with the Flyers (I think), Joni had this to say (sort of):

Hm. "Then diagram liquor selkiytymään," might be something, but otherwise we're just going to have to keep an eye on the guy, lest his "Beforehand famous rhetoric" gets carried away. The guy could be bonkers.

In the meantime, picking up a defenceman 22nd in overall D scoring in an off year is basically always a good thing, especially since by the end of the 2007 Sean Hill was looking like a tantalizng offensive pickup.

Indeed, Pitkänen has had his share of cockups in front of his own net and most people will point first to his dreadful plus/minus last year. Yet, a more detailed analysis over at Behind the Net reveals that when Pitkänen was on the ice he accounted for a net +.041 goal differential over 60 minutes for his club last season (nevermind that, at a glance, he was also an impressive +22 in 2005-06 over 58 games). His even strength numbers are indeed gaudy with a 2.74/3.70 GF/GA split for a net -0.96, but not much worse than Jason Smith's -0.82. Smith, of course, played against tougher opponents, but the overall point is that Pitkänen doesn't worry me nearly as much as Sheldon Souray does at even strength, and even at that, he has more upside at 23 than either Smith (a UFA after next season) or Souray.

I think it also says a lot that only the dumbest mouthbreathers on Flyerswebboards were happy to see Pitkänen traded, even with a highly serviceable Jason Smith going back in return. Best of all, the Oilers shed themselves of the biggest hex coming out of the Pronger deal, JoffreyLupul. Watch out, Philly ladies!

Nice post, and I hope that someone that knows Finnish translates for us. The only thing I would dispute is that Pitkanen didn't play minutes that were as hard as Smith. He frequently played on Philly's "shut-down" defensive pairing with first Rathje and then Zhitnik. After the trade deadline, he wasn't used like this and, unsurprisingly, his +/- improved substantially. When the Flyers played at home he was consistently trotted out very intentionally against Crosby, Jagr, Briere and Lecavalier. Those can be pretty tough minutes. I know Smith did the tough work for us and that Joni struggled in his tough minutes in Philly, but I believe that the drop-off in defensive production between Smith and Pitkanen has been really overstated. I would be shocked if Joni wasn't doing the tough sledding in Edmonton and doing a comparable (if not better given how much better our goaltending is than Philly's was last year) than Smith has done.

"I had heard a lot about the Flyers before, and that they are far away from Finland. One day Ruslan Fedetenko pulled me aside and with a raised fist told me that if I gave the puck away again he'd endanger my health. He diagrammed it for me and then we drank some serious beers and gossiped about other players on the team."

Finns always have the worst time speaking English. The Swedes seem to have the easiest. Lidstrom sounds like he was born in Detroit. And the Czechs all sound the same for some reason. A cunning linguist could do thesis work on it all, I'm sure.

It does bear pointing out here that Finnish is from a totally different language tree (Uralic) than every other major European language (Indo-European). Also, the reason why Swedes have it relatively easy is because both Swedish and English are both Germanic languages (though the former is a North Germanic language, like Norwegian, while the latter is a West Germanic language, like German).

Thanks. Ironically, I didn't even know Chomsky was a linguist until I took intro linguistics with a former grad student of his a couple of years back. I just assumed he was poli-sci, because those were the only guys who ever talked about him.